Ah, the terrible evil of communism. We're pretty sure The Communist Manifesto has a chapter about punting golden retriever puppies and stealing kids' treat-or-treating stashes.

If we sound sarcastic, it's because communism as a concept is not inherently evil. Yet the past one hundred years of U.S. history have made it the bad guy of Western, democratic, capitalist thought.

Sound too philosophical? That's okay, here's what you need to know: America has opposed the ideas of communism both economically (the U.S. likes to let people and companies make as much money as they can) and governmentally (the U.S. prefers democracy with elected leaders, rather than non-elected leadership like a dictatorship).

Tonkin Gulf Resolution follows this pattern of American thought by making communism look like the supreme bad guy. The document makes this clear with lines such as "naval units of the Communist regime" (2) and "deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression that the Communist regime in North Vietnam has been waging" (3).

Eek.

Whenever possible, Congress points a finger at North Vietnam as being evil, and communism being at the heart of it. Think about it: saying "communist Vietnam" emphasizes the negative communism thing—you wouldn't say "capitalist America" unless you wanted someone to think that there's something bad about capitalism.

And the fact that this doc was whipped up in 1964, during one of the chilliest periods of the Cold War, makes the statement "communist Vietnam" even more damning. To the readers of the day, they might as well have written "puppy-punting, Fun Size Snickers-stealing Vietnam."